Beyond the boundaries of established science an avalanche of exotic ideas compete for our attention. Experts tell us that these ideas should not be permitted to take up the time of working scientists, and for the most part they are surely correct. But what about the gems in the rubble pile? By what ground-rules might we bring extraordinary new possibilities to light?

James McGinn:Here is my blurb on "Pauling's Omission"Actually there are no anomalies of H2O. There is just bad theory which is saddled with bad assumptions that are paradigmatically taboo for researchers. All we see are the tactics that the paradigmatically faithful employ to avoid confronting the fact that their theory sucks. In actuality, when you get the theory correct all of H2O's anomalies disappear.

This was submitted by somebody calling themselves "Reality Check".

Here is a link to "Reality Check's rather pathetic attempt to dispute "Paulings Omission"goo.gl/gCKqTY

Reality Check:We understand that YouTube is full of crank videos and are skeptical about citations to it. The obvious exception are the mainstream science video channels.

ETA: A 40 minute video with the title "Pauling's Omission: The Original Sin of the Natural Sciences" and no description does not inspire confidence that it contains valid science. Presumably that is Linus Pauling who was an eminent biochemist and Noble Prize winner. Biochemistry and his specialist field of quantum chemistry is not meteorology. The ADS Database has 359 abstracts for him, 3 for 'Linus Pauling surface', and none for 'Linus Pauling tension'.

The video up to where things get really wrong.The video starts with a fantasy that the surface tension of water has something to do with tornadoes - tornadoes are not made of liquid water!Ignorance of "we just do not understand H2O".We understand a lot about water, e.g. hydrogen bonding, the origin of surface tension.Mostly ignores the scientific literature and textbooks and cherry picks a journalist, Philip Ball, who is a prominent science writer with 9 selected articles on water.Plays a YouTube video abut water with textbook physics and states it has absurd claims. If he bothered to actually learn abut water from textbooks, he would know about why it has high heat capacity, high boiling point and surface tension (essentially the hydrogen bonds mentioned in that video!).Incredibility about "70 anomalies", i.e. properties of water, that are not found in other common molecules.Asymmetry of the H and O atoms due to H2O being a polar dipole.Simplistic "electric gradient" and "stretching of electron clouds" stuff.Symmetry of O2, methane.10:20 may be the introduction of a fantasy of turning H2O into a non-polar molecule.10:45 and we get to hydrogen bonding and his "Pauling omission" error."Linus Pauling credits T. S. Moore and T. F. Winmill with the first mention of the hydrogen bond, in 1912"Scientists not knowing about his imagined things in videos and books is not an omission.An imaginary "incidental symmetry" is introduced with cartoons about its results (magically removes the asymmetry that makes H2O polar).For example he thinks that a cartoon of 2 HF molecules side by side removes "electrical gradients".Hydrogen fluoride is a normally gas, not a solid ! Its molecules do not line up to allow imaginary calculation of electrical gradients. Solid HF fomes a zigzag structure due to hydrogen bonding!So we have no physics. Just cartoons that do whatever he imagines things do which the physics says does not happen.

There is no "taboo" about discussing models. Meteorologists want to discuss their models. There is the scientific literature where meteorologists discuss their models. There are web sits where meteorologists discuss their models. There are TV documentaries where meteorologists discuss their models.

James McGinn:Here is my blurb on "Pauling's Omission"Actually there are no anomalies of H2O. There is just bad theory which is saddled with bad assumptions that are paradigmatically taboo for researchers. All we see are the tactics that the paradigmatically faithful employ to avoid confronting the fact that their theory sucks. In actuality, when you get the theory correct all of H2O's anomalies disappear.

This was submitted by somebody calling themselves "Reality Check".

Here is a link to "Reality Check's rather pathetic attempt to dispute "Paulings Omission"goo.gl/gCKqTY

Reality Check:We understand that YouTube is full of crank videos and are skeptical about citations to it. The obvious exception are the mainstream science video channels.

I think you should hold off before you reveal you are a complete idiot. Unbreakable faith in convection is a sign of simplemindedness.

jimmcginn wrote:ETA: A 40 minute video with the title "Pauling's Omission: The Original Sin of the Natural Sciences" and no description does not inspire confidence that it contains valid science. Presumably that is Linus Pauling who was an eminent biochemist and Noble Prize winner. Biochemistry and his specialist field of quantum chemistry is not meteorology. The ADS Database has 359 abstracts for him, 3 for 'Linus Pauling surface', and none for 'Linus Pauling tension'.

jimmcginn wrote:The video up to where things get really wrong.The video starts with a fantasy that the surface tension of water has something to do with tornadoes - tornadoes are not made of liquid water!

Only an imbecile would suggest this is not a reasonable premise. Especially considering that tornadoes are a mystery to science.

jimmcginn wrote:Ignorance of "we just do not understand H2O".We understand a lot about water, e.g. hydrogen bonding, the origin of surface tension.

Duhr. Look up "anaomalies of H2O."

jimmcginn wrote:Mostly ignores the scientific literature

This is a blatantly stupid claim.

jimmcginn wrote: and textbooks and cherry picks a journalist, Philip Ball, who is a prominent science writer with 9 selected articles on water.Plays a YouTube video abut water with textbook physics and states it has absurd claims. If he bothered to actually learn abut water from textbooks, he would know about why it has high heat capacity, high boiling point and surface tension (essentially the hydrogen bonds mentioned in that video!).

Reference?

jimmcginn wrote:Incredibility about "70 anomalies", i.e. properties of water, that are not found in other common molecules.Asymmetry of the H and O atoms due to H2O being a polar dipole.Simplistic "electric gradient" and "stretching of electron clouds" stuff.Symmetry of O2, methane.10:20 may be the introduction of a fantasy of turning H2O into a non-polar molecule.10:45 and we get to hydrogen bonding and his "Pauling omission" error."Linus Pauling credits T. S. Moore and T. F. Winmill with the first mention of the hydrogen bond, in 1912"Scientists not knowing about his imagined things in videos and books is not an omission.An imaginary "incidental symmetry" is introduced with cartoons about its results (magically removes the asymmetry that makes H2O polar).For example he thinks that a cartoon of 2 HF molecules side by side removes "electrical gradients".Hydrogen fluoride is a normally gas, not a solid ! Its molecules do not line up to allow imaginary calculation of electrical gradients. Solid HF fomes a zigzag structure due to hydrogen bonding!So we have no physics. Just cartoons that do whatever he imagines things do which the physics says does not happen.

The idiot has nothing useful to say here. Undoubtedly this is the first time this retard has ever encountered any of this.

jimmcginn wrote:There is no "taboo" about discussing models. Meteorologists want to discuss their models. There is the scientific literature where meteorologists discuss their models. There are web sits where meteorologists discuss their models. There are TV documentaries where meteorologists discuss their models.

It is overwhelming how dumb the public is about the details of science.

i really like your insight into water...i suspect myself that the surface of a body of water will be incredibly turbulent at the micro scale as it is at the macro...and that dust and micro-organisms are in some part neccessary aspects of evaporation..i attempt thought experiments w/r to your ideas of how water molecules actually let go and loft...please keep up your mahi(work)jimmy...appreciated bro...cb

This fact makes it really difficult for members of a scientific discipline to be honest about the fact that they don't yet have all the answers. In other words, and unfortunately, members of a scientific discipline have a really tough choice to make when it comes to being comprehensively honest about what they are not sure about. They can be really honest and expect to be ignored and not be funded. Or they can be dishonest and fudge the truth, pretending to have 100% certainty. This way they are not ignored and they have a better chance of getting funded.

Given these unreasonable options the members of the meteorology discipline chose to lie a bit and keep their jobs. One can hardly blame them, especially given the fact that if they didn't do this then undoubtedly somebody else would come along and done so. So they told a little fib.

Actually it is several little fibs:1) They pretended to know that moist air defies its known boiling temperature to become genuinely gaseous in the atmosphere. (Which set the stage for pretending to know that moist air powers storms through convection.)2) They pretended to know that a dry layer acts like a shield to convection3) They pretended to know that latent heat caused the gusty winds of storms4) They pretended to not notice all the observations that are inconsistent with and contradictory to these notions. 5) And, lastly, they pretended to not notice that these notions had never been tested.

Meteorology's storm theory is a hold-over from the nineteenth century when people were generally ignorant and believed plainly stupid things, like the notion that a pot on a stove was a good analogy for storms. It's easy to pretend like you have a deep scientific understanding of a scientific subject if you just go along with what everybody else believes. It takes no talent to agree. It takes no intelligence to pretend to understand. And it takes no effort to lie and obfuscate in order to appeal to what people already want to believe. Much of science lies about water because all of science appeals to the lowest common denominator of science consumer--and everybody "knows" water is simple.

Well, water isn't simple. And pretending it is simple is a major obstacle to progress in many disciplines, like meteorology. Exposing this pretense is a theme in the first chapter of my next book.

Are you the kind of person that suspects an underlying complexity to our reality that nobody quite understands so everybody just pretends to understand and tacitly agrees to not call attention to each others pretenses? Are you the kind of person that suspects that different academic factions have colluded to sow confusion so that their collective failure to understand this underlying complexity of our reality is not revealed to the public? Are you the kind of person that believes the public can so easily be led astray by pretentious, sciencey sounding rhetoric that diverts attention away from the wider revelation of this poorly understood underlying complexity of our reality? Me neither. So I was just as perplexed as anybody would be when I first encountered the the zeroing out of polarity with with fully coordinated (symmetric) hydrogen bonding between H2O molecules (as in liquid water).

I too have done some thought experiments along these lines. It will help if you have a comprehensive understanding of how H bonds neutralize polarity, as explained in "Paulings Omission."

The fact that evaporation produces cooling tends to fool people into thinking that, therefore, evaporation must produce gaseous H2O. Actually it doesn't produce gaseous H2O. (in fact, this is impossible.) But understanding how/why it does produce cooling is complicated until one first understands the nature of H2O heat capacity.

H2O heat capacity is associated with the conserved continuous movement that is itself associated with polarity neutralization that I explained in "Pauling's Omission. In other words, water conceals constant pendulumic activity. This activity is too slight to be noticed with the naked eye. But it has been observed--by Einstein. He mistakenly labelled it Brownian Motion. (I saw this [the Einstein part] on a video that I've since been unable to find.)

Water, by way of polarity neutralization, is the source of all of the elasticity in our environment. Both the thermal elasticity and the structural elasticity, as in life.